Reviews

The Sundance mission As Robert Redford's Sundance Institute turns 35, these 10 short films make good on its mission to "champion the risk-takers and pioneers whose stories reflect and shape our world."

This latest Marlon Wayans vehicle is a send-up of the "found footage" genre, from Paranormal Activity to The Devil Inside, and if the name of its director — Michael Tiddes — makes you chuckle, then is this the movie for you!

Not-so-mod Squad In the history of Hollywood violence, Gangster Squad scored a footnote when it was pulled from a September release, after the Aurora shooting for a scene in which gangsters machine-gunned their way through the Grauman's Chinese Theatre screen.

Civil rites Michael Roemer's modest, eloquent, New Wave-y micro-movie — made independently in 1964 — is essential viewing for its matter-of-fact look at an average black man's struggle for dignity in the Deep South in the early '60s.

In the tradition of Arbitrage and Thank You for Smoking , where the people who contribute to making life miserable are seen as just regular guys, Gus Van Sant, along with screenwriters Matt Damon and John Krasinski, collaborate in this ambiguous homily about the energy crisis and environmental pollution.

A pixie-haired girl (Erica Linz) catches the eye of a strapping young aerialist (Igor Zaripov) in a traveling circus, and the two are transported to a dimension that's made up of set pieces from every Cirque du Soleil show under the, well, soleil.

Spaghetti southern style Tarantino reconfigures that classic American genre, the Western, setting his new film in the Deep South, creating what he terms a "Southern," while infusing it with the spaghetti sensibilities of Sergio Leone (director of Tarantino's favorite film, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly ) and, more so, the genre grit of that other Sergio, Corbucci (director of 1966's Django , naturally).

In this brilliant Cold War political drama set in the GDR in 1980, a doctor, Barbara (the extraordinary Nina Hoss), is exiled from East Berlin to a provincial town by the Baltic Sea because she has requested to move to the West.